Hurricane! Unscatched so far -The conversion of Frank Schaeffer / Poem: Neighbors

Patch does a great job with the weather updates.

Hope your owner AOL doesn't shut you down.


Shortly after noon, I just came back from my walk up and down the street. Very high winds. I walked in the middle of the road in case branches came crashing down.

Minor branches were in the road. I picked them up and put them on the curb. No sense having motorists drive over them.

Above is my little pile of sticks. Also picked up Nancy's from across the street (you can see em if you enlarge photo). Patrick, from my poem "The Man in the Distance," had huge numbers of fallen branches. I picked up the lighter ones and piled em up.

He will know who did it.

Met Gary at 232 Cowbell, I think, who'd lost a lot of tree branches. He was outside wearing sensible blue gloves and was breaking them apart.

His crawl-space flooded. (I haven't checked mine. It never floods.) This is the third time his has.

I looked at his house. "Dyou live in the house Ken Roberts lived in?" I asked.

"They were two before us. They were crazy as shit."

I agreed.

"Actually it was his wife," I said. "I'm a poet and I wrote a poem about her called Neighbors."

She had manic-depression and refused to take meds. She was impossible. At a garage sale, I bought some of the items she routinely bought when she went on bipolar shopping sprees."

In fact, I still have the four TV tables I bought and have my laptop on one of them.

My 89-yo mom, who lives up Byberry Road in Huntingdon Valley, was up all night with my sister Ellen mopping up 3-inch flood waters from the family room and laundry room.

I offered to go and help, but they finished the job. They also had one of those vac-u-sucks.

Actually it's not a good idea to drive. Many roads - or portions thereof - are closed. Byberry Road at Pioneer is closed, so I never would've made.

I slept downstairs in my family room with a flashlight next to me.

Watched the 1946 film Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham which was excellent. The TV signal kept fading (my TV has wabbit ears) and it was sooooo frustrating cuz some of the lines were really well-done. It was Tyrone Power's first starring role in something othan as a swashbuckler.

He was very convincing. The film was the highest-grossing of the year.

But our eyes kept turning to his former girlfriend, Gene Tierney, whose outward beauty and delicacy was the opposite of her interior manipulations and narcissism.

While waiting to see how Irene would blow into town, I finished "Patience with God" by former right-wing evangelical Christian Frank Schaeffer, who says he's "lived to take back" most of his former beliefs.

His 230-page book is so well-written, I hoped to find a video of him on YouTube. Here he is on the
Rachel Maddow show. His interview is positively apocolyptic.

One of the things I learned from his book is that Revelations in the New Testament almost didn't make "the canon." Similar to Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, but for different reasons.

I love Bible history and the discussion of religion.

My happiest moments are when I lay in bed, ready for sleep, feel no pain whatsoever, and enjoy my small pin-dot spot in this mysterious universe.

NEIGHBORS

Just go to her
he said from the sidewalk,
just poke your head in the door
and say hello. I have to go down
the street and fix a lock. He carried a
a toolbox no bigger than a toy
and walked bowlegged
like a rodeo rider
or a man whose legs
were coming apart.

His wife was a
Christian Scientist. Imagine
finding a religion to
endorse your desire to
take no medicine and nurture
a ruthless condition with verses
from a Holy Book.

Her manic-depression
shook our street. Doors shut
when we saw her coming fast
up the hill, her mouth
jabbering at the birds,
her limbs flailing at
invisible assailants.

So I took the hill and cut across
the grass. His blue Taurus
waited in the carport. She
didn’t drive. He told me
she would badger him for hours
to take her shopping.

Finally, because he was an old man
and losing ground, he would give in
and she would load the car with
heaps of fresh fruit and
button-down blouses and
sale items clipped from the paper.

I rang the bell. After
a while she came to the door
in a brand-new hairdo.
“Looks nice,” I said.
She made a face and mouthed
she didn’t know what to do with it.
I had never seen her still.
Getting a perm meant
being able to be still,
to sit in a chair
feet off the ground and
follow the commands
of the woman who winds
the curlers through your hair.

“Just fluff it up,” I said, showing
her with my fingers. Her hair was
a fine brown and three-quarters of
a century old.
“Well, I combed it already,” she said.
“Yes, it looks nice.”
I knew that no matter where her
husband had gone or how far
into his seventies or eighties he
had gotten
he was stuck with this woman.

When she left for good for the nursing home,
her kids threw a huge garage sale
for the things left behind,
some still swinging with tags.
Ann, I’m sorry , I said as
I lugged home the bathroom rugs
a winter jacket and button-down
blouses I found in the carport.
I threw the jacket out a while ago.
Didn't want to think about her
in captivity.